Last night, March 27, John Britsios and Razvan Girmacea talked about the process of recovering from a Google penalty, on a live hangout on Google Plus. The webinar covered the process of identifying the links that are a threat to your rankings, and how to recover from a manual penalty, and also Penguin.

If you do not have time to watch the entire webinar, you can check the text summary below the video.

About the hosts

John Britsios is a Forensic SEO & Social Semantic Web consultant. He has been involved in the SEO industry for the last 8 years. He is also known as the “Webnauts”. John is the founder of SEOWorkers.com, and you can follow his personal blog on Google Plus on +AlgoHunters. He has recovered numerous websites from Google penalties which include manual, Penguin, Panda, Top Heavy, EMD, and PMD.

Razvan Girmacea is the CEO and founder of Monitor Backlinks. He has created a popular SEO tool used by thousands of users from all over the world. You can try his tool at MonitorBacklinks.com.

The webinar

During the hangout, Razvan has interviewed John about the methods that he uses to identify and recover from a Google penalty. These are some of the tips shared:

In case of a manual penalty, the very first thing to look after, are the backlinks shown in the Google Webmaster tools. Then you go and download all the latest backlinks as a CSV file.

Now comes the part where you have to decide what backlinks are more risky or which links are not of good quality.

The first thing to look for is the backlinks coming from domains with the highest PageRank. John manually checks all the backlinks, and he starts with relevancy.

The next thing to look for is the number of external backlinks for the pages that link to the penalized website. Links from such domains are low quality and you have to check if it’s something relevant and pay closer attention if it’s worth keeping that link.

Once checked the relevancy and the number of external backlinks, John checks the link statuses. He ignores the nofollow backlinks, as they don’t pass PageRank, and checks only the dofollow ones.

John warns everybody not to use tools that automatically identify the links that you should disavow. It’s very important to MANUALLY check all the links, otherwise you might end up disavowing some of your best backlinks.

After identifying all the backlinks that are a threat to his rankings, he tries to remove the backlinks. Then he disavows all the crappy links, removed or not. John also shows how he recovered RainVac from a Google Penguin penalty, and advice everybody not to give up. Penalized or not, it’s very important to monitor all your backlinks on a monthly basis.

There is no special formula or percentage for the anchor text distribution of your backlinks. To identify the over optimized keywords, John uses the page “Anchor text” from Monitor Backlinks.

The last thing he does, is to remove from Google, the pages linking to his website that are not live anymore, and have a 404 or 410 status. For this, he uses the Google removal tool.

A lot of other useful tips have been shared during the interview. If you don’t have time to watch it today, bookmark the page, and you can come back again later.

Written By

I am an inbound marketer. I enjoy doing SEO and recovering websites from Google penalties. I also do social media, conversion rate optimization and more.
You can connect with me on Twitter or Google Plus.

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Comments

1 Comment

This is not helpful at all! ‘Now comes the part where you have to decide
what backlinks are more risky or which links are not of good
quality.’?! What is that?! Using the right software and tools, the
process of removing links is made easier and quicker with The Link Auditors, their
tools find the toxic links for you, thus you not having to ‘decide’
which backlinks are harmful.

Secondly, do NOT disavow! It is not
meant for this process, only for genuine victims of blackhat SEO! The
Link Auditors also have a link removal tool which is quick and
effective, much more so than the disavow tool. When you have removed the
links, then you can file for a reconsideration request, and you will
stand a much higher chance in recovering from your Google penalty.